Savvy online marketers use landing pages to increase conversion rates in their online campaigns. Simple design combined with continual testing gives better results than simply pointing traffic at a page and hoping it produces results.
Simple design
You usually only show landing pages to a specific audience, such as people coming to your site from an e-mail campaign. This means you can afford to reduce the amount of information you are showing your visitors. For example, you don’t need your whole site navigation on a landing page, because you only want people to act on the offer immediately in front of them.
The landing pages we build typically have a headline, image, copy, offer and call to action. These five elements often are all you need. Scrap everything that does not directly contribute to visitors buying now.
Read Copyblogger.com to learn more about headlines and copy on landing pages.
Traffic sources
Often, we are pointing pay-per-click traffic at our landing pages. This is good because you get a steady flow of traffic; not so good because you are paying for every click you get.
You also can use e-mail traffic — send out an e-mail to your house list with a link to your landing page instead of your usual product page. If your list is over 10,000 names, try segmenting your list for even better results.
(Read my e-mail marketing column here, and an article on increasing conversion rates in e-mails at www.conversationmarketing.com/2008/01/double_email_open_rates_with_t.htm.)
A third option is direct mail. Postcards can be a (comparatively) cheap way to test what headlines, etc. get people to buy.
Testing
In traditional A/B testing, you test one set of elements vs. a second set of elements and use the winner. In multivariate testing, you test all elements at once. With the modern ubiquity of multivariate testing tools, the only good reason I know of to do an A/B is if your traffic volume is very low.
Which testing tool to use depends on your level of sophistication and your budget.
You can use a free tool like the Google Website Optimizer (http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/) — free to use, fairly simple to install if you know much HTML, fairly simple to learn.
You can buy a service where you do the creative and they implement it. Big benefit here is that you don’t need to tie up technical resources with your landing-page campaign. One company in this area is Naehas (www.naehas.com).
Another choice is a landing-page optimization tool such as Widemile (www.widemile.com). It can handle large amounts of traffic and will take care of most of the technical side of things.
Lastly, you can hire an Internet marketing agency (like us, for example) to do it for you. This costs more than doing it yourself, but you get the added benefit of marketing expertise.
If you hire a firm to help you, count on spending $1,000 to $10,000 per month on its services. If that is out of your price range, learn how to use Google Website Optimizer.
Apply your results
Count on spending two to three months initially on testing your landing page. With a moderate level of traffic, you will then have a good idea of what elements sell best.
Now it is time to apply what you learned. That headline that outsold the others 2-to-1? Try putting it on your product page or your homepage as appropriate. Did a blue “Buy Now” button perform better than a red button? Change your product page accordingly.
You can keep your landing-page campaign going and test new elements against the winners from your first campaign. As you discover new winning elements, try applying those to the rest of your site.
Resources
Make sure you understand the basics of Web analytics before you invest in a landing-page campaign. My column on the subject can be found here.
Brian Keith works for Portent Interactive (www.portentinteractive.com), an Internet-marketing company based in Seattle. You can contact him at 206-575-3740 or send e-mail to brian@portentinteractive.com.
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